Passage of time in games - Volume 2

Welcome.

Today I'll be rounding up this topic, talking about some more games involving the passage of time. 

Zelda OoT and MM

Both N64-generation Zeldas have some some dealing with time (apart from the ocarina of time, that is). 

On Ocarina of Time, the day/night cycle gives the game realism. At day, Hyrule's market is lively, voices can be heard, there're fewer enemies on the field. When night comes, the castle gates get shut, castle candles get lit, field monsters change. NPCs do not have specific time-based schedules, though they do act differently depending on whether it's night or day (a fine example being the graveyard man).

On the other hand, Majora's Mask features different stuff. The game plays through three days, having the main character go back in time and repeating the cycle multiple times. Personally, this game was the first one which gave the "interactive village" feeling, having characters do different things at each moment of each day, being able to see them walking around, checking their mail, dancing, etc. The Bomber's Notebook, is a huge plus, as it enables the player to take note of where each character is at each moment, being able to track every one of them effectively. Not only the characters have different schedules throughout the three days, but music and dialogues also change. depending on the day The ability to slow down and speed up time was very useful, too. 

Radiata Stories

Yep, Radiata Stories does feature one of the most interesting approaches to scheduling characters' daily routines. Firstly, this game greatly improves on the "interactive village" concept given above, having one huge castle city and lots of small villages populated with exceptionally dynamic characters. Secondly, the game has a real lot of characters going around, most of which you can recruit to your party, which gives you a solid reason to look into each one's schedule and activities. Although every day is exactly the same, there's still more than enough variety, as the in-game world is huge.

Each area's day music is subtly different from their night music, having lighting change drastically upon time of day, creating an interesting, inmersive experience. Unfortunately, this game doesn't give you any in-game mechanism of tracking the characters down, so any perfectionist may have to seek help from GameFAQs in order to complete their friends list. Still, in terms of time-based villages and characters, this game rocked.

To resume today's endeavor, we talked about some interesting "interactive-world" games. Different approaches were taken for this: OoT divided night and day and had each character do different things accordingly. Majora's mask took three days, and scheduled time-based routines for each character. Finally, Radiata Stories, took a single day but programmed a dynamically big interactive world. The bomber's notebook from Majora's Mask was an excellent resource to keep track of each character, as one of the most entertaining things to do is observe the game world and discover what each character does. 

We end here. Next time, we'll take a step towards real-time interactive games, such as Farmville, Virtual Villagers and Animal Crossing.

Passage of time in games - Volume 1

Hi everyone. I've decided to start a series of articles on the passing of time in games (day/night cycles, day-of-week mechanics).

Watching how the sun rises and night turns to day on a game is always fun and pretty. It adds realism to the game, give the players the feeling that they're in an interactive world/town and add characterization to whichever place or characters are in the game. We will be talking about some of the games that use them, and how they use them, thinking of how well they implemented them or what they could have done to polish them better. The first game I could trace to implement a day/night cycle is Red Alert, an arcade game from 1981.


Ultima V
Ultima V. Though I haven't played the game, from reviews and player comments the cycle seems to go way too fast, not giving the player enough time to explore small places completely. Villagers do have different schedules depending on the time of day.



Harvest Moon Series

The harvest moon series have always contained some time-passing mechanism implemented, as the game generally has the player play through several years. In most games, each year is divided in four seasons, and each season in 30 days. Besides, each day may be sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy, and there are special events on some dates (named festivals).

From the start, the villagers change their schedules depending on the time, though they don't walk from one place to another until later in the series. In latter games, each villager also has a different schedule for each day and weather, as villagers seldom go outside when it's raining and get more outgoing in summer. There are also birthdays on some days, and villagers changing their reactions according to day, weather, season, relationship with the villager, etc. There's enough degree of variation in these ones, even though the latest games seem to focus less on making each day seem different and more on formulaic gameplay and farming-mechanics.

Seiken Densetsu 3

 Ahh, Secret of Mana 2. The DNC was a nice addition to the game, also tackling the gameplay-changing-upon-time topic. Even though people didn't have strict schedules, shops changed their merchandise, NPC's changed their location and enemies were shuffled (some enemies even slept at night). Battle mechanics also changed, as one of the warriors (Kevin) could morph into a werewolf at night, thus increasing his attack power. Apart from time passing, this game also implemented a week-cycle of elements, giving more power to each day's element (Water, Fire, Wind, Earth, Leaf and Moon), adding one more day where all mana is balanced (and all inns are free, too!).

It was nice to see time passing when you took a ship or explored a dungeon, so I believe the DNC elements were enough. However, given that there was a whole day-of-week system, there was almost no impact in gameplay other than changing how elemental properties worked. Having some events working only on some days wouldn't have worked (as day-skipping is quite boring), but subtly changing dialogues or landscapes would have worked quite well on this one.

To sum up, we have seen games featuring simple day/night cycles, day-of-week cycles and games which implemented year-round mechanics. Most of them featured different schedules for each NPC, some of them changing upon weather, day of week and other variables. Nice touches include direct reference to a day's weather, changing gameplay according to moment of day and making fun the idea of the player discovering what each character does at different times, and when characters meet.

That's all for today, next time I'll be talking about Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask and Radiata Stories.

Pathways

Pathways is a very interesting experimental game dealing with interactive storytelling. Reminiscent of choose-your-own-adventure books, this game always starts the same way and ends a different one, based on the path you took. 

Hello there, hun!

The game features 8 different paths and though the beginning is always the same (a woman in your room telling you that she worries when you're gone), it's very fun to find out the relationships between each character and just what your character is going to do.

In terms of graphics, they're kind of ugly, but then if you're looking at experimental games, they shouldn't be a concern. Gameplay is interesting, and a big-scale game with these same mechanics would be great. The only similar game I can think of is Steambot Chronicles (which I haven't played), but there are actual choices and dialogue branchs instead of the game's 'pathway decisions'.

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Today I die

Today I die is a beautiful yet short experimental game. 

The game builds mainly on creative war logic, and is quite fun to play.  Graphics and sound were minimal, but the idea of the game was interesting enough to keep playing. Very intuitive, and a little bit sad in the end.

Source

Every Day the Same Dream

Surfing http://indiegames.com, I've stumbled upon the game Every Day the Same Dream.

It's quite an interesting game. Each complete playthrough lasts 20 minutes or less, and involves playing through a series of dreams - about a mundane life. What's quite appealing in this game is the sense of monotony it evokes and the minimal elements that break from it. Seemingly, you're a white-collar worker living a monotonous life, and can do little actions to change the fact - though the little actions the game does do change your perceptions.

It's nice to see how the game changes on each dream during a single playthrough. Graphics are minimalistically great, with city environments in shades of grey. The song played during gameplay is monotonous, 

but it effectively adds feeling to the game. And the ending is interesting, if open.

Most interesting, it was made in under 6 days. Do play the game.

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Games can change the world.